Nick's Bag of Tricks

• Reader

Contributing

The course reader is a live webpage, hosted through GitHub, where you can enter curriculum content and post it to a public-facing site for learners.

To make alterations to the reader:

1. Run git pull, or if it's your first time contributing, see the Setup section of this document.

2. Edit an existing chapter file or create a new one. Chapter files may be either Markdown files (.md) or Jupyter Notebook files (.ipynb). Either is fine, but you must remain consistent across the reader (i.e. don't mix and match filetypes). Put all chapter filess in the chapters/ directory. Enter your text, code, and other information directly into the file. Make sure your file:

   • Follows the naming scheme ##_topic-of-chapter.md/ipynb (the only exception is index.md/ipynb, which contains the reader's front page).
   • Begins with a first-level header (like # This). This will be the title of your chapter. Subsequent section headers should be second-level headers (like ## This) or below.

   Put any supporting resources in data/ or img/.

3. Run the command jupyter-book build . in a shell at the top level of the repo to regenerate the HTML files in the _build/.

4. When you're finished, git add:

   • Any files you edited directly
   • Any supporting media you added to img/

   Then git commit and git push. This updates the main branch of the repo, which contains source materials for the web page (but not the web page itself).

5. Run the command ghp-import -n -p -f _build/html in a shell at the top level of the repo to update the gh-pages branch of the repo. This uses the ghp-import Python package, which you will need to install first (pip install ghp-import). The live web page will update automatically after 1-10 minutes.

Setup

Python Packages

We recommend using conda to manage Python dependencies. The env.yaml file in this repo contains a list of packages necessary to build the reader. You can create a new conda environment with all of the packages listed in that file with this shell command:

conda env create --file env.yaml